"You should clothe yourselves instead with the beauty that comes from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God." 1Peter 3:4 NLT
Hey everybody! I know its super late...but this weighed heavy on my heart tonight. If you don't love anyone else, please love yourself. It really hurts my heart to witness how poorly many people view themselves. I know how it feels to have a poor view of myself. Its only by the grace of God that I was delivered from that. When you have an unhealthy view of yourself, you inadvertently negatively affect those around you. Your pessimist view of self can't stay bottled within, and of course like toxic waste it infects its surroundings. Like foul air that swiftly permeates its surroundings, the lie that you believe about yourself will spread and infect other areas of your life as long as you allow it. You have to view yourself the way God sees you. You are truly precious, so valuable that God wanted to save you from eternal damnation by receiving a pure sacrifice.
I've noticed that many black people here in Charleston have the crabs in a bucket mentality and still heavily believe in the dark skin versus lighter skin paradigm. I personally recognize myself as brown because that's all I am, a shade of brown. Beauty is more than the reflective surface of your skin; on the contrary, the most beautiful person may not be the most attractive outwardly but have a heart of love for all. I'll never forget this day...when I was still taking heavy doses of steroids and had gained quite a lot of weight, I absolutely hated how I looked. I nitpicked about everything I could, my skin, my stomach, my everything. I felt like I was being held prisoner in my own body and God knows I prayed every single day to not feel that way and for deliverance. You see, I had some negative experiences during my childhood and associated beauty with being skinny and having long hair. Luckily my prized hair had not fallen out like most people with a lupus diagnosis (I told yall I didn't have lupus! Lol). But everything else was foreign to me. I cried every single day over the changes I had no control over. I couldn't control how the medicines made me feel or look and I wanted it to go away. But thank God for the angelic child He had cross my path one day at K-Mart.
I don't really even remember what I was looking for, but the little boy had stopped and dropped his hand from his moms and stared at me. She came back and told him to come on, then he said "she's pretty" about me. It made me cry because I didn't see what he saw. I saw the scarred body from uncontrolled weight gain, the rashes and acne scars from the varied medicines I now had to take, and the broken heart because for once there was something I could not fix. I learned that day that he saw what I could not see and God opened my eyes. Since then I have come leaps and bounds and I love myself for who I am, scars and all. I get a little sad from time to time, but I know that God saw something in me worth saving.
So sorry its so long...and I actually had to wait to finish this. Getting the spirit mentioned above is no easy process. You must submit to God every single thing that is bothering you or weighing you down. Stop merely looking at life through your physical eyes and look beyond the things that hinder us from truly seeing each other. Once you love yourself unconditionally, you can truly love others.
"And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" Matthew 22:39 NIV
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